2027 Imagining Human Worlds
Imagining Human Worlds brings together several Common Ground Research Networks whose work intersects with questions of learning, culture, identity, communication, diversity, ethics, and the human dimensions of social life.
Each year, one participating Research Network serves as the host Network, helping shape the symposium’s particular emphasis within the wider theme of Imagining Human Worlds. For 2027, the New Directions in the Humanities Research Network is the host Network for the event, foregrounding humanities-based inquiry into culture, meaning, ethics, knowledge, and human experience.
The symposium creates a shared online space where these related but distinct fields can meet in conversation, encouraging new connections across research areas that are often separated by discipline, profession, or institution.
Imagining Creative Worlds is one of four annual Online Symposia in the Common Ground Imagining Futures Series, alongside Imagining Human Worlds, Imagining Social Worlds, and Imagining Sustainable Worlds.
Each symposium in the series is designed as a more concentrated forum for emerging questions, interdisciplinary engagement, and sustained discussion around a unifying theme. In this way, Imagining Creative Worlds is both a distinct event in its own right and part of a wider framework for dialogue, publication, and field formation across a connected ecology of research and practice.
The symposium creates opportunities for dialogue across disciplines that are often closely connected in practice, but separated institutionally or academically, bringing together scholars, researchers, artists, designers, educators, museum professionals, publishers, and cultural practitioners in a shared online environment.
Imagining Creative Worlds is also part of Common Ground’s ongoing work on the knowledge experience: the question of how research communities gather, exchange, document, and develop work across connected digital environments. In this sense, the symposium is not only a venue for presentation and discussion, but also a practical experiment in more continuous and collaborative forms of scholarly communication.
Hosted by the Common Ground Media Lab, the symposium is connected to a wider program of research, design, and platform development. Through CGScholar, Common Ground’s in-house platform, the event brings together live exchange, asynchronous participation, publication pathways, and collective outcomes within a single environment. The symposium therefore contributes both to the life of its participating Research Networks and to the Media Lab’s ongoing work in designing and testing new forms of knowledge practice.
